'In Europe, the Bird will fly by our rules': EU tells Twitter post Elon Musk's acquisition

After billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition, the European Union on Friday asked the social media platform to abide by EU's laws, stating that "the bird will fly by our rules" in Europe. This comes in response to Musk's tweet "the bird is freed", referring to his purchase of Twitter.  

The tweet was made by Thierry Breton, the Commissioner of the internal market of the European Union, in a reference to EU's attempts to regulate American tech giants and expectation that American tech companies will abide by European regulations whilst operating in the EU. Whilst in America, there is a gradual bipartisan shift towards regulating tech, be it Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairperson Lina Khan's (a Democrat) attempts to crack down on monopoly in bigtech or Senator Josh Hawley's (a Republican) vocal arguments against Section 230, the EU has taken the lead in regulating BigTech. 

Back in July, the EU approved the Digital Services Act, a landmark regulation aimed at reigning in BigTech. Many people who earlier worked for BigTech have raised concerns about the impact of the platforms on people's mental health, attention span, incentivisation of crass content, such as Tristan Harris who worked as a tech ethicist at Google earlier and facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. As per a report by CNN, Haugen had said to European lawmakers in 2021 that EU's initiative in regulating BigTech can serve as a "global gold standard" which can show other nations how to regulate BigTech. A Financial Times report from July had mentioned that BigTech firms attempted to lobby Europe and convince European lawmakers that regulating Tech will be a bad idea. 

Why has EU taken the lead in regulating BigTech?

“The EU is regulating platforms both to address the impact of platforms on society and competition,” said Nathan Furr, an associate professor at INSEAD business school, as per a CNBC report. If Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into the "everything app/X app" he will have to ensure that he does not violate EU's laws, which are very strict against anti-competitive practices. Recently, the EU successfully forced Apple to have the USB-C charging port in its devices instead of Apple's lightning chargers. The EU introduced the law to ensure interoperability amongst devices, something that Apple has historically shied away from. Musk's vision of Twitter, an app that can be used to tweet, chat, transfer payments, purchase goods, book flights, book hotels may be viewed by EU lawmakers as concentration of power and anti-competitive in nature. The EU also has stringent laws that curtail speech.